Things fall apart

Felipe A. Yanez

Aside from the newly-placed “art” in the center of campus, apartment 34S – and the entire Apartment Area for that matter – are the biggest pieces of crap at the University of Miami.

In the eight months since I moved in at the beginning of the semester, my apartment has gone from a mighty little two-bedroom mini-fortress with new carpet and a kitchen to a shabby shanty that almost makes me yearn for the dorm days of Stanford and Pearson. Almost.

Among the things that have had to be fixed over the course of the school year: a refrigerator light that wouldn’t turn on, a window that hung off of one hinge, a broken toilet handle, a bedroom door that wouldn’t even close because it couldn’t fit in the friggin’ door frame, and a bathroom light that turned into a strobe light whenever it was turned on. (Perfect if you like to rave, not so much if you have epilepsy.) And I’m not even including the 56 layers of lead-based paint on the walls, the occasional cockroach, and the mysterious stains on the couches.

But despite living in the Detroit of apartments, 8-CARE has always been a valuable resource in delaying the deterioration of apartment 34S. The UNICCO guys on the receiving end of 8-CARE are the handiest group of MacGyvers the university has ever seen. I’ve called 8-CARE and have had every crappy broken thing about this apartment fixed the same day. I can’t even get my professors to return test grades back in the same month! They’re efficient, use minimal tools, and speak very little. All they need to say is “what’s the problem?” and “BAM. FIXED.” So for that, I want to pay my respects and thank everybody at 8-CARE, one of UM’s unsung heroes.

And if I haven’t made this any clearer, let me close by saying this: the Apartment Area sucks. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re a freshman or sophomore that couldn’t get into University Village, the apartment area is a great upgrade from living in the dorms. As my roommate Derrick said, the Apartment Area is “old but spacious, dirty but welcoming.” But considering the Apartment Area was originally built to house World War II veterans attending UM on the GI Bill, and that the third floor of my building, Pentland House, doesn’t have anyone living in it because of the presence of mold, asbestos and probably ebola, I think I can safely conclude one thing: this motherf***er needs to be torn down.

I live right across from the chic BankUnited Center and the sexy new Fieldhouse, and it’s not fair to those nice buildings that they have to be in the vicinity of a housing area that’s past its prime. It’s time to kill the dinosaur that is the Apartment Area, and make way for new housing for UM’s future protégés to reside in.

Former University of Miami Dean of Students William W. ‘Bill’ Sandler, Jr. passed away on August 6 a ...

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The Miami Hurricane is the student newspaper of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. The newspaper is edited and produced by undergraduate students at UM and is published weekly on Thursdays during the regular academic year.